THE GUIDANCE OF THE SOUL IN HINDUISM
Ancient India is famous for her ingenious and elaborate ways of guiding the human soul. The various Yoga doctrines and techniques in Brahmin and Buddhist teachings command the deep interest of modern psychologists, medical men, and scholars interested in the history of religion. These more or less esoteric techniques require a particular aptitude and an inborn propensity, and the constant advice of an expert. These techniques, however, form but the pinnacle of a vast structure, the comprehensive system Hinduism provides for the guidance of the soul.
My personal impression is that this system with its stratifications that show the deposits of traditions and of ages, with its manifold initiations and practices, rituals and mythical tales, is hardly to be fully understood or explored in one lifetime. For the purpose of this lecture I have selected a few items which seemed to me comprehensible, and of some interest for the members of the Analytical Psychology Club.
The general situation of Hindu religious psychotherapy is strikingly different from our own, and so is its technique, yet there are points in common. To speak of this Hindu guidance of the soul and what we can gather of its methods is, in the terms of Jung’s analytical theory, to speak of the role of the archetypes. The Hindu system of guidance and psychotherapy is meant to serve men throughout his life and is addressed to everyone. It consists of rituals and mythical tales, designed to inspire and guide man’s soul through their immediate appeal to his faculty of imagination; through directing his feelings and feeding his intuition. This Hindu guidance of the soul aims at keeping the psyche in a well-balanced and healthy state, in spite of the perils and disturbances which tend to upset its normal growth and hamper its vital transformations, in adjusting to the sequence of life’s stages.
Through a Hindu who told me of his childhood and early home life, I one had a glimpse into the actual application in Hindu daily life of certain traditional rituals, which in part I knew from the old Sanskrit tradition.
First he told me of the ceremony called the “Giving away of the fruit”: this is a ritual which the spiritual guide and lifelong house priest of the family (the “Guru”) enacts with the mother of the household while her son is growing up. This ceremony is a kind of weaning away of the mother’s soul from the overpowering possessiveness of her love for her male child. The spiritual guide, the Guru, by enacting this ritual and enforcing its lesson on the mother's soul, represents, as it were, a higher, suprapersonal collective instance, a benevolent, but severe and exacting father-imago, an aspect of destiny or Providence. In a symbolic procedure, accompanied by tales, the Guru acts out the relentless demand made by life and the outer world upon the mother, to surrender her dearest treasure, to give him up to the world and to his own life career, a demand which can only be fulfilled by sacrifice.
During the subsequent stages of this ritual, the mother is asked to sacrifice to the Guru a series of objects which she likes and cares for most. She is asked to give these up, not once only, but repeatedly, in the course of many years. The ritual goes on throughout a considerable period of time, leading gradually to a climax. Again and again the house priest, enacting the spiritual guide, approaches the mother and asks her to offer him something. First she has to offer him fruit, the very kinds she likes most. The priest eats the fruit in her presence while she herself must fast. From the symbolic offering of fruit the sacrifice proceeds to metal objects, starting with inexpensive possessions and proceeding to more valuable ones. The priest accepts them as a gift from the mother. The sacrifice ends with gold, in fact with a substantial part of the mother’s jewelry. These jewels which the priest takes from her, constitute, with her clothes, the only exclusive possessions of the Hindu women.
This ceremony is repeated during several years, and is marked by a definite gradation. Through it the mother is trained, as it were, to surrender what she cherishes most. She grows mature enough to face the final sacrifice toward which these offerings gradually increasing, are meant to lead her. The Guru watches her attitude. When he ascertains that she is ready to face the supreme sacrifice of giving away the dearest fruit of her life, the sequence of offerings reaches its climax.
The final ceremony is enacted before a small and solemn assembly. The male relatives and representatives of various castes and professions are invited. These symbolize society, professional life and the world at large, which the boy is about to enter. The assembly of males represents the order of the adult, the future sphere of the youth, to which the mother is asked to surrender him. Society, the world, life, accepts the sacrifice of the son from the mother; they witness his definite departure from her lap, and from her dominating influence. For the benefit of both, the mother must, in this way, rid herself of the spell of possessive mother love, definitely conquering her most deep-rooted feeling.
On this occasion, the mother who rules the household, offers a feast to the whole company, while she herself fasts; and throughout the whole day she is not allowed to sip even a drop of water, a peculiarly trying observance in the Indian climate. This ritual should effect her actual abdication of the role of domineering motherhood.
This “Giving away of the fruit” is an article from the household pharmacy of traditional psycho-dietetics. It is meant to prevent the “perils of the soul” which arise from the prolonged and overpowering influence of an all too loving mother on her grown up son. It is particularly indicated in Hindu family life. Motherhood constitutes the chief aim and fulfilment of the Hindu woman’s life. To bear a son is her highest duty and the justification of her existence. For without a son, the uninterrupted succession of offerings, feeding the ancestor spirits of the male line in the next world since time immemorial, would be broken, exposing them to starvation.
A barren woman, among the Hindus, is abhorred by her relatives and ashamed of herself. Since living sons are the highest pride and treasure of woman’s existence, mothers are liable to experience particular difficulties in detaching themselves from their sons when the sons outgrow motherly care, and should begin to live a life of their own. Hence the mother has to learn at an early stage how to part with the fruit of her own life and body. The Guru who leads her through the gradation of sacrifices begins this series of inspiring ceremonies at an early date, generally when the boy reaches his fifth year.
This preventive cure of the mother complex in Hinduism is but one among many rituals and initiations through which the Hindu guidance of the soul takes charge of the human being, leading him throughout his entire life. Hindu civilization is caught in the meshes of an elaborate system of ceremonies and sacraments. Even the small children play at ritual, imitating the grown-up.
My Hindu friend told me of the children’s ritual dealing with the goddess Jamburi, which evidently inspired the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, in which rituals play a significant role. For the Boy Scouts call a solemn rally a “Jamboree.” The worship of the goddess Jamburi, as it is performed today by Hindu children, is meant to teach the young initiates how to face the inevitable trials of life, how to face destiny and life’s task through perfect devotion and sheer soul-force. Older children initiate the smaller ones. The course of the ritual starts in the child's fifth or sixth year. The smaller members of the group, at first, participate in the ceremonial by silently watching its performance.
The ritual covers five years and is enacted during the nights of the coldest month in winter. Adults are not allowed to watch its performance. The children get up before sunrise, very early, before the birds start singing or animals leave their dens. Every night they shape out of clay the tiny idol of the goddess Jamburi, out of the same clay or mud which forms the playground and the material of their primitive toys in the daytime. This is done in exactly the same way that grown-up people shape idols for the purpose of worship. After having served once, these perishable idols are thrown away into the holy waters of the nearest river or rivulet, to be dissolved by them.
This small idol of Jamburi has neither arms nor legs, her eyes and mouth are scarcely visible. In front of the fetish a little artificial pond is formed, banked in by a low wall of mud. Jamburi is offered water, flowers, and sacred grass. This offering is accompanied by the following formula:
“I offer thee water before any crow has sipped of it.
I offer tee flowers before any bee has partaken of their honey.”
An indispensable part of the worship of Jamburi consists in the story of this goddess, which is retold every time the ritual is performed. The meaning of this tale is: Though Jamburi has no arms and no legs, though she has no real mouth, no real eyes, yet she can accomplish everything. She achieves everything, for she has Soul-force. That is what her initiate needs to know and to imitate.
This ritual is a creative outburst from the unconscious psyche of the child; it is a charming flash of genius, out of the intuition and imitative imagination of childhood, which has grown into an institution. Through it the child’s unavoidable inferiority complex finds a playful compensating cure.
Children watch the grown-up people achieving things, through their mature abilities, which children are not able to do. They know of the many rituals in Hindu life which they are scarcely allowed to watch when their elders perform them. They guess their importance and spiritual meaning. Here, in the performance of the Jamburi ceremony, children find an outlet for their emulation through a ritual which they can enact in their own right. It constitutes a kind of canalized compensation, an initiation which prepares the children for the major tasks life has in store for them, for life’s trials. It voices the traditional attitude of Hindu ascetic idealism, which is to deal with such trials through self-abnegation, determination, and soul-force.
Other rituals constitute a kind of group-dietetics of the soul. They cleanse the atmosphere of group or family life from undesirable congestions of mutual dislike and hatred. They regulate the attitude of the group members toward one another by providing for a ritually canalized outlet for these feelings among them, feelings which in daily life have to remain repressed; the firmly established code of ceremoniously correct and respectful behavior makes repression the rule. The Santal tribes, for instance, celebrate a periodical family reunion. The whole family gathers from near and far. They lock themselves up in their main house. All doors and windows are tightly closed. Each member of the family renders himself or herself deaf—as deaf as possible—with the aid of cotton wool stuffed in their ears; and, upon a certain signal, the give vent to a terrific outburst of all sorts of resentment against one another. They bombard each other with the worst of invectives that they are able to think of. No no can hear what the others are shouting. This occupation goes on until everybody has to stop from sheer exhaustion. Then, much refreshed, and relieved of what they had had to stomach from one another while behaving nicely and correctly for so long, they all return again to the ordinary routine of perfect harmony.
A similar, less grotesque ceremony aims at the periodical reconciliation between the sisters and brothers of the Hindu household, through the strengthening and expression of their mutual sympathy. It is called “bhratrisphota”—the “auspicious mark put on the forehead of the brother.” My Hindu friend told me that it is performed on the second night of the waxing moon of October, which is an auspicious date in the pleasant Indian fall. This night, all the sisters in the Hindu household gather and invite their brothers. The ritual which they perform at this family festival is meant to safeguard the life of their brothers against untimely death. It is a kind of offering or charm for the overcoming of death. It is said to derive from a mythical ritual which the first sister of mankind, Yamuna, invented for the protection against death of the first man, her twin-brother Yame. Through this ceremony the sisters are reminded of her famous example, and are asked to live up to her attitude of perfect love and devotion.
The sisters have to fast and to prepare a special dish for their brothers. This dish consists of very pure substances meant to impart superior life-force. In order to prepare it the sisters take a walk after midnight the night before the ceremony takes place. At that time they collect the dew of heaven from the leaves of plants and trees. That is the purest essence, sheer life-sap descended from the celestial sphere unto earth, the life-bestowing water distilled by the kingly God Moon who rules the life of the vegetable and animal kingdom. He feds the creatures with his milky, cooling rays, and with the dew of the night throughout the ten long rainless months of the year. The moon is the divine receptacle of refreshing, nourishing life-sap; it is the golden cup from which the gods drink their beverage of immortality. This pure essence of heavenly dew is mixed with rice which is newly unhusked, that is, clean and full of life-strength; then, with banana, clean and fresh, newly-skinned, and with milk of the coconut, split just for this purpose. All these fresh and pure substances are meant to impart the very life-force of heaven and of the vegetable realm to the brothers who are invited to partake of the meal. In fact, these substances form a kind of substitute for the beverage of immortality; of the “amrita,” the “drink of deathlessness” which, in name and function, corresponds to the "Ambrosia" of the Olympian gods.
As a symbol of renewed life, the sisters bestow new clothes on the brothers. The men take a bath in order to cast off, symbolically, their old garb, fraught with mortality; they then don these clothes before sitting down to the magic dish. The ritual reaches its climax with the painting of the auspicious mark on the brothers’ forehead by the sisters. The unguent used for this purpose consists of a stuff which is meant to confer life-force. It is said that in the same way, at the beginning of time, Yamuna marked the forehead of her mythical twin-brother Yama in order to protect him against the grip of death. In the course of this ceremony the story of Yama and Yamuna is recited. It is retold in detail how Yamuna proceeded, and how she was successful in protecting her brother against untimely death, until, finally, he became immortal and ascended into heaven. There he founded the realm of the departed ancestors, a realm of everlasting bliss. At the end of the ritual, the older brothers bestow a gift of candy upon their younger sisters, the older sisters upon their younger brothers.
A significant feature of this ritual, again, is the relating of a mythical story, which sets an example of ideal behavior. In the same way, the house priest who performs the ceremony of the “Giving away of the Fruit,” each time he accepts the mother’s offering, tells her a mythical tale about a mother, or a woman, of yore, who, in bygone times, enacted the ideal attitude of perfect self-renunciation. These tales deal with women who had to sacrifice what they loved most, even to their own lives; who, by so doing, through this utter detachment, became capable of performing miracles.
Mythical tales and legends of this kind are among the classic means and everyday requisites of the Hindu guidance of the soul. They serve to entertain and to educate the illiterate, but sensitive, masses of this old and highly refined civilization; and, in addition, formed and shaped, as they are, by the collective mind of this civilization and filtered through the approval of many generations, they address their advice immediately to the intuition and imagination of their listeners. They conform to the logic and the characteristics of the feeling function, and to the creative forces of the unconscious. An “Ocean of Streams of Tales”—as one of the richest treasures of such tales, full of wisdom and symbolical meaning, is called—has fed the Hindu soul throughout ages. With its manifold waves of figures and happenings, it represents the spiritual guidance of the masses who listen to these stories. The people. unwavering in their attention, keep them alive in the villages and all the country, especially at the holy centers of pilgrimage. There, in the huge temples, pious crowds gather, seeking spiritual advice at the feet of priests and saints, who impart spiritual advice through this pictorial language handed down from mythical antiquity.
These tales, pointing out a model attitude, offer a cathartic diet to the soul, restoring its balance, and preventing its being stifled and starved. In this way, the oral tradition of mythical tales and legends fulfills an office similar to that of the tragical performances of the Athenian theater in Ancient Greece. The symbolic deeds and sufferings of the heroes, their model attitude in a tragic career, offered to the audience a series of archetypal features with which it intuitively felt these plays worked upon them a kind of collective katharsis.
A model instance of this kind of cathartic guidance of the soul through the recounting of tales, one which has gained worldwide fame, springs from the cooperation of the Hindu and the Moslem genius. It is contained in the frame tale of the Arabian Nights. The princess Scheherazade, through an unending series of stories, eventually cures the unfortunate Sultan of his cruel and terrible hatred of women. Thanks to her courage, persistence, and inventiveness, the bloodthirsty monarch eventually gains a renewed faith in mankind and woman; he finds a new faith in virtue and the values of human life.
The marvelous tales which Scheherazade tells him combine, in story form, man’s varied experiences of life in many an ancient Oriental civilization. The tales derive from Persia, Egypt, and Arabia, from India proper they contain, essentially, the ancestral wisdom of many generations and of ages bygone. They convey a venerable philosophy of life, imbued with faith, courage, and simplicity; they teach the listener how to face destiny under its most distressing masks and puzzling garbs. Ethics and psychology, sifted and crystallized through a timeless process of tradition, are unfolded by means of an unending sequence of breathtaking events. The ancestral wisdom of the intuitive guidance of the soul inspires the courageous Scheherazade to face death, to face every night and morning anew the threat of being beheaded, like the many victims preceding her; for were the sinister monarch to tire of her charm and her tales, relapsing into his merciless attitude against womanhood, this would have been her fate. But in pouring fourth the guiding wisdom of ages in a sequence of tales, so astutely chosen and told as to intertwine and form an endless chain, she succeeds in healing her husband of his apparently all too well deserved inferiority complex, which had breathed forth deadly hatred and destruction against any women whose conquering charms had doomed her to become his consort and mistress.
Through her prolonged therapeutical guidance in the form of these tales, Scheherazade finally frees the Sultan from his unhappy self-centered state. She discloses to his view the infinite richness of life and experience; she opens up before his eyes the miraculous interplay of luck and fortitude, the wish-fulfilling power of pure intentions, and the strange meanderings of fate; she illumines the effect of perfect soul-force, even in the middle of the desert. In this way she stimulates the unconscious forces of his psyche, and releases them from torpor, from the fatal spell that held them captive. She alleviates the deadlock of feeling, the stifling of inner growth from which the monarch suffers.
Short stories as a means for the therapeutical guidance of the soul are a kind of household medicine in India to this very day. Sri Ramakrishna, the famous Bengal saint and teacher of the nineteenth century, used them again and again in his talks with people who sought his spiritual advice. These tales, as fixed, institutional, magic elements of the therapeutical guidance of the soul, draw upon the enormous treasure of Hindu mythical tradition; they live on it and help to keep it alive. When, years ago, I came upon these instances of their use in the Hindu household, I found a new insight into the reason why I had come, years before, under the lasting spell of Hindu mythical tales and figures. I had become fascinated by the background of archetypal symbolism, as it is fashioned and maintained by the collective genius of Hindu civilization, and this very contact with the deep sea of archetypal images—the deepest that exists—the experience of being submerged in it, and flooded by it, I then understood, had constituted, for me, one approach to the theory of the archetypes in Dr. Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious.
From the Hindu point of view it is a rather odd fact about us Westerners, that the archetypal background of the human soul remained to be discovered by Analytical Psychology at the end of the nineteenth century. In one respect Christianity had a poor start, stemming as it does from the Hebrew religion, whose rigid monotheism is conspicuous for its lack of a rich mythological and archetypal background. Christianity, along its own lines, compensated for this deficiency by evolving out of the one and only God the figures of the trinity; and by giving the feminine principle a place through the figures of Mary and her mother. Hosts of saints, impersonating various attitudes, emerged from the collective imagination in the Middle Ages, forming an archetypal chorus of subsidiary figures. With legends and idols, miracles and miracle plays, the stage was set for an unending variegated archetypal performance, for the interpretation of life and the guidance of the soul; but Protestantism rang down the curtain, and scientific secularization closed the house. This heritage of a treasure containing countless figures and masks, auspicious and sinister, benign and terrible, demonic and godly, as they constitute the Graeco-Romen Olympus and its everlasting myth, as they teem in orthodox Hindu religious life and, people still the Gothic porches, altars and eaves of Roman Catholic churches,—this enormous treasure was “frozen.” Unaccommodated by the sober atmosphere of Protestant parishes, where did this host of superhuman figures go? Banished from the ecclesiastical spiritual diet, they entered the secular food, and became its powerful leaven. Their energies, and the urgent need for them, fed the newly born tradition of Renaissance humanism. This leavening process produced the revival of the Greek tragedy by Racine and his followers; it is found working in Goethe, and into modern times. Its richest and most enduring product became the opera, developing in the seventeenth century, with Gluck’s “Orpheus” and “Iphigenia.”
Even taking first into account Wagner’s remarkable musical genius, it is clear that the enormous impact of his heavy operas, especially that of the intricate and hardly digestible stuff of the “Ring,” upon audiences unable to understand the original text, is due to Wagner’s masterly intuition in diving into mythical tradition and conjuring its figures. The powerful appeal of his work is based on its intrinsically archetypal background.
In our days, the moving picture, with its heroes and heroines, has definitely taken the lead in conjuring and representing archetypal figures and attitudes. The moving picture has simplified for mass consumption what formerly was achieved by novels and operas; the femme fatale, the vamp, the lady killer, the Don Juan, the faithful mistress and helpmate, la belle sans merci, the unconquerable lady-witch enthrall the male audience by representing the equivalent fulfillments of the dreams of man’s psyche, archaic and everlasting. Its ability to demonstrate archetypal features is one of the important elements of a moving picture’s success. Yet, in spite of this constant display of archetypal figures in the cinema, in the theater, in novels and works of art, and the somewhat hectic enthusiasm for this kind of entertainment and artistic value which prevails. In spite of those modern classics, Joyce and Picasso, the archetypes have, among us, a ghost-like aspect; they hover like specters and are scarcely recognized, though they are as powerfully at work as ever. They were discovered only because they proved disturbing, haunting the conscious personality, obsessing it, and enforcing strange attitudes.
With the Hindu soul the problem is different. Through religious guidance by tales and rituals the soul is fed on archetypes. From early childhood on, it is in close contact with the archetypal figures serving as models and is imbued with their qualities. The mythical tradition is carried on by means of the stories told by parents and grandparents to the children as they are put to sloop. The mythical tradition is the vehicle of the ethical and religious education of the masses; it discloses divinities and heroes performing their archetypal tasks and conquests, enacting model attitudes of dutiful self-abnegation, valor, wisdom, and devotion. The sanctuaries abound with such images, as did Gothic chapels before they were purged and whitewashed by the ascetic spirituality of Protestantism.
For every situation and relation in life there exists a model in myth. The figure of Yamuna teaches the sisters how to enact their role in family life to perfection. Savitri, who followed King Death on his way back to the netherworld when he carried away her husband’s life, ready to surrender her own, to rescue his soul, is, in her virtue and daring the popular model of the Hindu wife; while the Great Goddess who, in her manifestation as Sati, killed herself out of passionate love for her offended husband, is the prototype of the Hindu widow, who accompanies her dead husband on the funeral pyre.
The results of this dominating rule of archetypal models cannot be but ambivalent, and to some extent doubtful. Through these inspiring models of an overwhelming tradition the Hindu is taught how to behave perfectly, according to an ideal archetypal pattern, in every situation of his life. He is constantly enjoined never to be himself, an individual person; never to give vent to his ego; but constantly to enact and live up to a mythical role or gesture. Tradition and community ignore the individual; they repress the person; they expect the ego to remain silent and unconscious. The elementary claims of the individual, his repressed emotions and reactions, resentment and frustration, find a periodical outlet in such primitive safety-valve rituals as that of the Santal family gathering.
The masculine character of Hindu Brahmin civilization exploits womanhood by restricting the native richness of its faculties; it narrows its scope to the attitude of the model housewife, and to the role of ever repeated maternity, for the production of abundant male offspring• Besides, the masculine intellectualism and spiritual asceticism of Brahmin civilization is not at all in favor of the bewitching, bewildering and sometimes disastrous role played by feminine charm, upsetting marriage, destroying family life, ruining man. Hence the maternal archetype is strictly enforced on every female from her very childhood. The result is a tremendous domineering mother-force, silently ruling the Hindu family. Rituals like the “Giving away of the fruit” are meant to atone for this enforcing of the mother archetype, and to neutralize the danger thus created and increased.
The most thorough and perennial criticism, however, of this godlike rule of the archetypes in the Indian guidance of man, is voiced by Indian ascetic philosophy and its yoga practice, throughout the ages. The central pursuit of Indian philosophy, the pursuit which its many antagonistic doctrines have in common, is the quest of the Self. This essence is conceived as beyond the realm, not of the ego, only, beyond the human individual as he is aware of himself with his environment, but beyond all gods and heavens; that is, beyond the realm of archetypal figures and manifestations.
Brahmin and Buddhist wisdom agree in the quest after this supreme state, beyond the fetters and features of any individual configuration, or of any archetypal suprapersonal attitude. They agree that the supreme value, and the only true reality, lie in this crystal-like essence, completely anonymous and featureless, devoid of activities and qualities. indwelling in man, and in everything as the very nucleus of existence. The sphere and realm of the gods or archetypes has to be transcended as belonging to the phenomenal realm of appearances, along with sense perceptions, mind and thought, all that constitutes the conscious personality.
The superhuman figures and forces of archetypal character, inherent in man’s nature and the universe, are viewed by Indian philosophy as forming a higher realm of sheer phenomenal appearance above the tangible sphere of human experience, more subtle and more powerful than the world of objects, but forming with it part of one and the same universal mirage, part of that comprehensive phantasmagoria, Maya, which has to be transcended on the quest for ultimate reality. On the yogin’s progress toward this goal, it is considered a particularly subtle and perilous temptation, this, of yielding to the enticement of these superhuman powers to become their equal and to inhabit their realm.
Analytical Psychology would style this the temptation to become identified with an archetype, definitely and disastrously, through falling victim to the supra- or infra-personal forces of the deeper unconscious. With the ideal archetypal figures suggesting and enforcing their model gestures on the conscious attitude of the devotee, his real individuality tends to remain undiscovered by him, unrealized and unconscious, buried as it were, under their superb weight.
This relative unconsciousness of one's own individuality is the result, in Hinduism, of intimacy with the archetypes and the direct impact they bring to bear. This is the counterpart in obverse, of the cult of personality in Western individualism, and our unawareness of the existence of archetypal forces. The perennial forces, typical attitudes and reactions of the psyche, which are reflected in an Olympus of archetypes, displaying the masks of gods, demons, and monsters, saints and knights, damsels, children, and various animals actually exist as the contents of daily experience in Hindu religious life. Life outside is in harmony with the living store of archetypal images within the psyche. It reflects and expresses them, it is overlaid with the symbols of the archetypal pictorial script of the mythic consciousness within man, and interpreted through them. The archetypes are worshipped, propitiated and appeased, in daily practice, as existing superhuman entities, that is, as suprapersonal beings. They fill and rule the outward sphere. the other hand, the devotee is taught that the divinity to which he is particularly devoted dwells in his heart of hearts; he perceives himself in union, in identity, with this divine being, and he is taught how to become conscious of this identity through the practice of daily meditation and contemplation.
With Western medieval man the situation was not altogether different. The last four centuries, with the evolution of modern man, have brought the change. Modern man has grown in another direction. The modern intellect no longer perceives an Olympus of archetypal figures, ruling the universe and man’s life; there is no established connection, either, between man’s conscious personality and the realm of archetypal images in the deeper layers of his psyche, which surge and urge from within. The impact of these images has become secret, unofficial, as it were. Yet it remains powerful through the very fact that it is unrecognized, uncanalized, and erratic.
Its workings in the collective unconscious of nations, in politics, is obvious. For instance, in the collective longing and imagination certain European peoples, in the hour of defeat, the archetype of the Old Man, embodying paternal authority and hoary wisdom, suddenly becomes the fascinating figurehead. In peace-loving China, with its strong paternal family organization and ancestor worship, this figure of the Grand Old Man, in the manner of Confucius of Laozi, has been the leading ideal image, socially and politically, throughout her long past. But this is not true of some continental nations, with their recent glory in conquest and cherished military tradition. In these nations, rather incidentally, some individual achieves the temporarily successful impersonation of the Old Man type; on a local scale, some Pope, or the late Austrian Emperor, Francis Joseph; and this is true also, by the way, of Queen Victoria, as an embodiment of the benign maternal archetype.
In times of defeat, however, with military nations like France and Germany, the Old Man emerges in the guise of an apparently venerable and stainless Old Field Marshal. He emerges from collapse and misery and comes to the rescue of the defeated nation’s psyche; he saves her pride and self-confidence while her unconscious is out of balance, because the leading archetypal attitude of the hero-like conqueror has failed in the course of events. In Germany in 1918, the heroic attitude, overstrained and exhausted through the four years of the first world war, collapsed with the final catastrophe and was discredited for a while. In stepped old Hindenburg, as Petain in 1940, and Field Marshal MacMahon, as the first president of the Third French Republic, after the military defeat of the Second French Empire in 1871.
This switching over to the avuncular old war-horse type, as it happens again and again, in case of defeat, with military nations, has something of a tradition; it is a kind of conditioned reflex, and, beneath its actual causation, through intrigues and political procedure, it is motivated by an archetypal pattern of the collective unconscious. It is an act of regression. The challenging attitude of the adult manly hero who sets out to conquer the foe, has failed. It has to be abandoned. There is a relapse from this grown up, defiant and independent attitude, back into the preceding stage of unadult dependence on the protecting authority of a paternal genius.
In the collective imagination of the shattered people, this primitive need prevails over the positive criticism, that this outworn old man, his aged mind trammeled by life-long, narrowing military routine, might not be possessed at all with the genius capable of pointing out a new future and solving the problems of an actual state of chaos.
The very fact that he belongs. essentially to a bygone brighter period, that his figure combines military glory with stainless integrity and unagressiveness, makes him a suitable center or screen for collective archetypal projection. His comparatively blank, anonymous, and mediocre figure serves as a dummy to be dressed up in a magnificent costume from the archetypal wardrobe. This pitiful and self-deluding flight of the collective psyche into archetypal projection is meant to prevent worse disaster and utter despair. These figure-heads, which answer a temporary necessity, but are inconsistent with a nation’s more vital tendencies, lose their power as soon as the collective psyche recovers its balance. And the individual who has to embody the archetype is apt to betray, unintentionally, the attitude and way of life which he was meant to personify.
In this country also the Old Man seems to be the major leading archetype by which the nation’s idealistic imagination is fascinated. But he is no occasional, passing figure, no incidental dummy dressed up in times of dejection; he is of an old and permanent standing. This Uncle Sam, showing from many posters since defense work was started, is the energetic extrovert counterpart of the contemplative Chinese Old Man, With his sharp, weather-beaten profile, his husky sprightliness, flashing, keen eyes, and dramatic old-fashioned costume in the nation's colors, he is the popular representative of Puritan pioneer family tradition and virtue, and of the manly will and strength to preserve the American way of life.
There is nothing in him of some other Old Man types which have fascinated and guided the soul; nothing of the Hindu guru, the knowing house priest and spiritual guide, of the shrewd or saintly brahmin and ascetic shaping Hindu civilization; nothing of the old wizard and all-knowing medicine man; nor of the high priest initiate of the Sarastro type in the Magic Flute. Yet all peoples which honor this same archaic image of the wise and efficient Old Man, under various garbs, as a model figure of statesmanship and honest home policy, may be able to reach an understanding among themselves, concerning a wide-flung new order, more easily than they might with those other nations who simply pick up this figure to overcome a major neurosis when defeated, and drop it when they recover from the blow. The much discussed planning of the post-war future dedicated to peace, encounters, along with difficulties of a more material nature, and tremendous tasks, moral and technical, these discrepancies in archetypal propensities, which set apart the collective individuals of one nation from another. This complicates the problem of welding them into a cooperative system.
I need not dwell on the actual role of the archetypes in the modern psyche, as it is traced in the theory and functioning of Analytical Psychology, through which the archetypes were discovered for modern men, in all their significance. Yet I should like to outline a general aspect of the archetypal figures, which gains in import the more we delve into the medieval or archaic situation of the psyche. This aspect is revealed by Hindu religious psychotherapy and guidance, and through other ethnological material. In Analytical Psychology, the role of the archetypes was discovered and traced in the case of patients; this casuistry reveals primarily their disturbing, sinister and daemonic aspect. Actually, of course, they are ambivalent, life-sustaining and disastrous at once—ambivalent, as are the elements fire and water. One needs not fear them, if only one knows how to deal with them, cautiously, honestly. That is the purpose of initiations in Hinduism, and the daily practice of the devotee. In delving into the Hindu material or that of kindred spheres, one senses in viewing ourselves from this other side what a peculiar sort of creature modern man is; how queer we seem, with this intellectual attitude of ours; lacking, as we do, any well-established institutional relation or approach to the mythical heritage of archetypal figures in men's soul. The obsessional character of the impact which the archetypal images exercise, as a rule, upon modern man, as illustrated in case histories, is the outcome of this singular attitude.
At first sight the archetypal figures are unfamiliar to us; they have to be analyzed and understood in their claims, have to be propitiated and appeased by an acceptance of their reality. This enigmatic, daemonic, and terrifying aspect of the divine archetypal figures, it is true, exists in the Hindu Pantheon also. There is scarcely any figure of benign and auspicious character which has not its sinister, wrathful counterpart; and in most cases the black and the bright side constitute the basic twofold aspect of one and the same superhuman power.
Almost any divinity manifests itself under a double aspect; one graceful and gracious, granting boons, bestowing support, conferring peace and alliance; the other antagonistic and negative, threatening, wrathful and destructive. of guidance is to befriend the friendly and positive aspects and manifestations of these suprapersonal powers, to become familiar with them through daily oblations, to be on intimate terms with one chosen aspect of these powers through daily meditation, amounting practically to self-identification, absorption. These exercises are meant to make man’s heart the sanctuary of their benign manifestation, and to make him conscious of their constant presence in this shrine.
We of the West lack this ritually established familiarity with the corresponding archetypes; nevertheless, from time to time we experience their presence, their alternating impact, benign and overpowering, in the vital phases of our life. With every newborn babe the archetype of the divine child is experienced, rather unconsciously, by the parents and relatives in first beholding the little creature. The illusory promise of a better age to come, of a new era of life, unburdened by the load of ancient debts, faults and trespasses, forms a glory radiating from every babe, as if it were the boy-savior descended from above, to rescue the world from chaos; an avatar, a divine being incarnate, come to conquer dragons, demons, the forces of evil.
There is no real love affair without a substantial influx of archetypal energy; archetypal imagination is the weft which forms life’s web, the web in which one is caught, fascinated and fascinating, to pledge himself or herself, headlong, for a lifetime. With every vital contact and encounter we are suffused by archetypal forces from within; we project them, and become their target and center. In those hours we experience the fullness of life; our feet get wings, our souls soar up to make us guests at the table of the gods in Olympus. Time and again we are urged to enact a more or less operatic archetypal role, and to watch our partner embodying the same, loving him or her for doing it well.
In this may we experience the meaning age-old and eternal, of our actual, individual situation. This is how we come to realize its vital significance, as it is outlined in mythical tradition and in the utterances of the poets. At the same time, we have to impersonate archetypal figures and attitudes, in order to disclose this secret meaning to our partner; that is the way a love affair reaches fulfilment. Both partners have to be swept up onto the stage and into an operatic performance, a secret and solitary one, with no audience except themselves, enacting hero and heroine, una cum uno.
These archetypal figures—the divine babe, the hero and his mistress, his helpmate, the divine father and mother, and others—preside in turn over the vital periods and relations of our biography. In submitting for a spell to their impact, the task of the respective period can be solved, through the realization of its timeless meaning.
When a marriage fails, and the child suffers a traumatic shock from the divorce, this disintegration of the archetypal family pattern is likely to be experienced by the child as a cosmic disaster, an explosion of the universe, and is reflected as such in the child’s dreams. In fact, Father Heaven and Mother Earth withdraw from each other, their cosmogonic eternal embrace ceases to be, the harmony of the spheres ends in a crash. The parents had been viewed by the child not as individuals, with their claims for personal happiness and fulfilment, struggling against frustration; they were meant to function as the figures of an archetypal play, enacting the masks of the perennial family myth, which ignores the private persons of the actors and their needs.
To enact an archetype is what is secretly demanded of the spiritual or even the political leader, of him who is capable of enacting the role of the great healer, leader or savior, though he may be unwilling to comply with this primitive demand. This is a rather odd truth when it is viewed in a truly democratic atmosphere, soundly suspicious of hero-worship, and quite aware of the possibly disastrous consequences of any kind of idolatry. Yet it is an element of analytical transference. And it is a common historic fact that much of the legendary splendor which subsequent generations have woven around the figures of great men proceeds from the magic rays of archetypal projection. The imposing individual is dressed up in garb and symbols out of the legendary wardrobe of perennial collective imagination.
We all have to experience at times in our life what it means to be flooded by archetypal energies from the deep well within our own natures; what it means to ride the tide of these suprapersonal forces; in all their glory—we know what it entails to become spellbound by this mask or role, or to fall prey to someone who has become identified with the dazzling superimposed image of a figure surging from our own imagination and dreams. We know how delightful and how painful it is to yield to the archetypal mythical figures, to the temptation to become identified with them, and swept off one’s feet. It is heaven and hell.
But to miss this experience altogether, not to be enlivened at al1 by this leavening influx, demonic and divine, would mean failure to experience the fullness of life. It would mean mere existence, which life should hardly be; not, at any rate, according to the standards of “perils of the archetypes” are, so to speak, the price which has to be paid for the fullness of life. These perils are constantly realized in Hinduism. It is to cope with them that the enormous apparatus of rituals and propitiations, of meditations and exercises of devotion is brought into play.
Let me round out these sketchy outlines with an episode out of the Krishna myth, the symbolism of which might be used to illustrate the ambivalent situation of man in relation to the archetypal, daemonic powers of the deep:
When Vishnu, the supreme god, makes his descent, his avatar, down to the earth, to rescue mankind from the crushing load of selfish demons, this avatar is a two-fold one: he appears as the dark-skinned Krishna and his bright half-brother, Rama. Among his other heroic exploits, as a boy, among the cowherds on the bank of the Yamuna river, Krishna conquers the serpent demon Kaliya who rules the water of the river, and lays waste the country all around with his fiery poisonous breath. Krishna leaps down into the flaming depths to battle the foe, but, entwined in its coils, his limbs are fettered, and he swoons under the poisonous breath of the serpent demon.
The cowherds and maidens on the bank shriek in utter despair, thinking him to be doomed. But Rama, his fair brother, his alter ego, standing on the bank above the watery prison, addresses the half-conscious Krishna, and reminds the boy savior of his divine nature: “Divine lord of the gods, why do you exhibit this human weakness? Are you not aware of your divine essence? You are the center and guardian of the universe. Our human relatives are overwhelmed by despair. Have mercy on them! You have played the babe and the boy, you have acted out human weakness; now display your power and conquer the fierce fiend!”
These words ring in Krishna’s ears and remind him of his true essence. A smile flashes over his face and his eyes open; he frees his limbs from the serpent’s coils that fettered him; he bows the demon’s head, and starts a triumphant dance upon it which he continues until it is conquered.
By assuming the garb of a mortal, the god in his avatar is temporarily overcome by this role, enacting it all too well by falling a prey to the demon. But his alter ego, his fair brother, reminds him of his essential nature, transcending the play, the operatic situation, to which he succumbs. Krishna is the model Hindu hero, yet he is capable of forgetfulness. He yields to the impact of the role which he is tempted to enact; but the other side of his twofold nature, represented by his twin brother, brings him back to his senses.
In a similar way, though in reverse application, when the Western psyche, falls prey to the demonic powers of the deep; when it feels itself fettered by their coils, and fainting under their fiery breath, still should it be able to attend to the admonishing voice of its alter ego, standing secure and unenthralled on the bank; to the voice admonishing it not to overact the archetypal role of hero-savior, or any other, but to remain aware—not, like Krishna, of its divine essence—but of its limited, individual, humane, and civil nature.
NOTES
This paper was read at a meeting of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City, January 16, 1942.
Spring: Contributions to Jungian Thought (1942): 43–58
© Copyright 1942 The Analytical Psychology Club of New York, Inc.